Advance Your Career with IWI's New Online Investment Courses
Posted by Allison Edmondson, Director of Communications
May 9, 2023 8:21:00 PM
Denver, CO - May 9, 2023 - The leading professional association for investment consultants and wealth management professionals, the Investments & Wealth Institute (the Institute), has added three new microcourses and one short course to its learning platform, giving certified advisor professionals new opportunities to earn up to 8 continuing education (CE) credit hours, online at their own pace.
This new wave of courses has been developed in partnership with other organizations and leading industry experts to improve the Institute’s ability to deliver educational content that reflects the external forces impacting the ever-changing industry of financial advice. These partnerships allow the Institute to accelerate the time to bring new programs to market. With this approach, the Institute expects to release, at minimum, one new learning offering—microcourse, short course or certificate program—per quarter.
“We don’t necessarily have to build everything ourselves, but we need to make sure our members and the advisor community at large have a reliable resource for high-quality content that is timely, accessible, and accommodating of different learning preferences, said Ross Riskin, DBA, CPA/PFS™, CCFC, MS Tax, Chief Learning Officer for the Institute. “We don’t just offer access to content — we create educational experiences that make complex topics easier to understand and enable advisors to apply what they have learned in order to immediately add value for clients and prospects.”
Microcourses provide the ability to succinctly earn 1 CE credit for CIMA®, CPWA®, and RMA® certifications and one CE credit for the CFP Board®. The Institute first rolled out the microcourse learning format in late 2022 with Social Security Planning, in partnership with Marcia Mantell, RMA®, NSSA®, President of Retirement Consulting, Inc. Mantell is well-known for helping advisors from the U.S.’s foremost financial services firms to understand complex retirement concepts and regulations.
The cryptocurrency microcourses were developed in partnership with Digital Assets Council of Financial Professionals (DACFP), which gives financial professionals the knowledge and skills they need to provide their clients accurate, relevant, timely and valuable advice about blockchain and digital assets. DACFP was founded by Ric Edelman, a recognized industry thought leader and founder of the largest independent financial planning and investment firm in the country. Both Edelman and René Chaze, an advisor to DACFP and a Partner with Tiny Orange Capital, contributed to the course development.
The three courses are:
Explaining Blockchain and Digital Assets to Clients and Prospects - outlines how blockchain and digital assets work, defines the crypto investment thesis, and analyzes the benefits that can arise from a broader use of blockchain technology.
Taxation of Cryptocurrency and Digital Assets: Part 1 - compares and contrasts how digital assets are acquired through purchasing, receiving, earning and mining, and describes how digital asset loans work and taxed.
Taxation of Cryptocurrency and Digital Assets: Part 2 - which identifies the tax implications of transferring and/or disposing of digital assets and describes how NFTs are treated by the IRS.
In addition to the microcourses, the Institute has also developed a new short course, Using BeFi to Build Trust and Manage Investor Behavior, which is designed to equip advisors with the behavioral knowledge to be able to elicit positive responses from their clients—building trust in their relationships—and manage investor behavior with confidence. This course provides the ability to succinctly earn 5 CE credits for CIMA®, CPWA®, and RMA® certifications and 5 CE credits for the CFP Board®.
The course was developed in tandem with Herman Brodie, founding director of Prospecta Limited, a firm that specializes in behavioral economics. Brodie is a world-renowned author, accomplished speaker and a trainer of decision-makers in financial services and other industries, such as healthcare, education, politics, charities, etc.
A full catalog of Institute online learning curriculum can be found here.